


some things i do for free

by carnation



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Automail, Community: femslash_today, Competence Kink, F/F, Pain As Pleasure
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-13
Updated: 2016-01-13
Packaged: 2018-05-13 20:05:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5715394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carnation/pseuds/carnation
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Paninya grips the arms of the refit chair and breathes loud and heavy like a woman giving birth, <i>whee-yooo, whee-yooo</i>, in-out, in-out, and Winry works quietly, steadily, kneeling down there on her battered old cushion... But after a while, like it always does, the anaesthetic and the pain and the steady quiet sound of Winry’s breathing swim together into one heady mess of endless sensation, and Paninya finds her cool.</p>
            </blockquote>





	some things i do for free

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for the prompt 'Winry Rockbell/Paninya, wired' in the [Cold Snap Porn Battle](http://femslash-today.livejournal.com/620853.html) at femslash_today, but I'm so wildly far beyond the deadline that I'm not totally sure it counts anymore.

 

“They’re not _exactly_ rocket launchers,” Winry says. She says it kind of thoughtful, kind of conversational, which means ‘rocket launchers’ is probably exactly what they are. Her tray of tools bounces and rattles and squeaks its way along the stone floor as she wheels it over to Paninya’s side. “So don’t go thinking you’ll be able to fly or anything like that, but the extra force they’re going to give you – the extra _firepower_ ,” she corrects, and flicks a quick smile to Paninya that says she’s more than pleased with herself, “firepower, do you get it? Because—”

“—they shoot flame,” says Paninya. Her voice comes out kind of strained, comes out filtered through clenched teeth. She’s gripping the old squashed leather arms of Winry’s refitting chair, and she’s gripping them hard. “I get it, Winry, totally, and I think it’s awesome, I think _you’re_ awesome – but you think we could talk about it after they’re attached to me?”

Winry blinks down at her – then laughs, startled, like she went and got herself so caught up in her own mechanical marvels she plain forgot the point of them. Paninya wouldn’t put it past her – wouldn’t blame her, either. If there’s anyone out there making automail good enough to lose yourself in, it’s Winry. “Right! Right, of course! Okay – let me just...”

She kicks her battered old knee-cushion into place and drops down onto it, settling in the place where Paninya’s feet aren’t. Carefully, carefully, she lifts one gleaming automail limb from the lowest deck of her tray of tools. Out here in the workshop, Winry doesn’t bother to keep it looking nice for customers, and the whole place is a wild jangling mess: bare stone below and bare bulbs above; clusters of screws bound together with wire, all strung up and dangling from the steeply sloping ceiling like sheaves of mechanical corn; open drawers and half-open drawers spilling out cables and cords and filaments; and everywhere lie pieces – of what? Of parts, of other pieces, pieces of pieces of spare parts and not-so-spare parts, and all of _those_ in pieces too...

And it smells like Winry – or maybe Winry smells like it. It’s been long enough by now that Paninya can hardly tell the difference; it’s been long enough by now that Paninya doesn’t see much of a point in drawing a difference anymore. Winry and her workshop: each of them belongs with the other, and both of them smell just as much like grease and leather and metal getting hotter. 

“Okay,” Winry says again, at last, and blows a few loose strands of hair back from her eyes. Whatever she’s been fiddling with, she stops. Next time she glances up, her stare is narrowed and intent. Still Paninya in the chair, but it’s all business now. “Hold tight, Paninya.”

Getting a refit hurts like hell. Even with the anaesthetic numbing down there so half her body feels like it’s a hundred miles off, like what she’s got left of her own brown legs are most of the way to Xing and Winry’s changing her automail on the side of a dusty desert path, it hurts like hell. Paninya grips the arms of the refit chair and breathes loud and heavy like a woman giving birth, _whee-yooo, whee-yooo_ , in-out, in-out, and Winry works quietly, steadily, relentlessly, kneeling down there on her battered old cushion. 

Like the slowest spreading fire in history, nerve after nerve lights up and burns, on and on... But after a while, like it always does, the anaesthetic and the pain and the steady quiet sound of Winry’s breathing swim together into one heady mess of endless sensation, and Paninya finds her cool. 

Things have got as bad as things can get – so now what? It still hurts like hell, but hell’s not so bad once you’re used to it. Between her sports bra and her underpants, her back is one big old smear of sweat against the leather chair. Paninya breathes easier; she drops her head back against the headrest and closes her eyes. The shadows of the workroom and its blinding lights are stark against her eyelids. She opens her eyes again, and looks down at Winry. 

Her head is bowed, blonde hair gleaming unnaturally bright in the beam of her work lamps. There’s room in Paninya’s head now for things that aren’t just pain, and first of everything is the steady firm pressure of Winry’s fingertips against skin that doesn’t feel anything but automail, 364 days out of 365. It doesn’t hurt, exactly, but it’s uncomfortable in a way Paninya never can work out. Could be physical – could be the foreign feeling of Winry’s relentlessly methodical touch against parts of her that just don’t get touched, the scarred-smooth sockets of her hips, where her legs are brown instead of glinting chrome, sealed away at all times except for these few hours, every few years. 

Or could be the discomfort’s all in Paninya’s head, and that’s likelier than it should be, too. It feels intimate, but not in the way that Winry touching her anywhere else ever does; it feels intimate, but it feels _wrong_ , like Winry’s touching her from the inside out, and it gets Paninya’s teeth clenching hard enough to grind all of their own accord. 

She shifts her grip, just minutely. Her fingers have cramped. The old leather’s grown sweaty under her hands. The three strongest lamps in the workshop got dragged right over to the refit chair before they got started this evening, and now they angle directly onto Winry’s head, and Winry’s hands, and the sockets and bolts of Paninya’s new leg, and cancel out each other’s shadows in their floodlit halogen glare. The automail gleams and dazzles and shines. 

“All right,” Winry says, at last. She says it from a thousand miles away and maybe a thousand years away, and Paninya blinks blearily down at her like she’s waking from a dream that lasted a thousand hours. She might as well have been in the workshop forever; it might as well be the middle of the night, and maybe it is: Winry’s the only one of them with a watch on her wrist, and Paninya can’t see it from here. “All right,” Winry says again, “now – _don’t_ get up – but move your toes for me.” 

Obediently, Paninya wiggles her toes for her. She flexes her knee for her as well, and then she draws her leg in from the hip for her, and she lets Winry manhandle it in all directions and answers every time: yes, it feels fine, and no, there’s no pain, and it’s lighter than ever and her responses already feel slicker than before, and everywhere she ought to have sensation, she has it, and, and, _and_...

“Perfect,” Winry concludes. She runs her hand over the seamless seam where metal anchors skin. “Do you want the other one tonight, or—”

“Tonight,” Paninya says immediately. “Soon as possible, if that’s cool with you. I got some rooftops need to remember what I look like, I wanna be jumping by the weekend.” 

Winry scoffs. “Yeah, right. Try _walking_ by the weekend.” She flips a spanner into her hand and levels it threateningly up at Paninya. “If I catch you doing anything more strenuous then stretching before I’ve given you my _express_ permission, then this leg is coming right off again.” 

Paninya’s not fazed. “Yeah, I hear you,” she says, agreeable as anything. “But think about it, Winry, right? How are we gonna test out my rocket launchers if I can’t do anything but walk?”

The wind goes right out of Winry’s sails. “Good point,” she says, and worries her lip for a moment. “Okay—” conceding, as she trails a finger down Paninya’s brand new gleaming shin, a spark of longing in her eyes, “—okay, maybe you’ll be walking _and_ rocket blasting by the weekend. _Maybe_. But only if I say so.” 

Winry’s immovable once her mind’s made up, stubborn as Paninya. Appealing to reason never works, nor appealing to sentiment – but appealing to automail never fails. Winry pushes herself to her feet, and Paninya hides her victory grin until her back is turned. 

Winry catches it anyway. She jabs a finger, though she’s grinning too. “I need to stretch my legs for a minute. Don’t try to activate the blasters while I’m gone.”

Paninya obeys, though it’s more than tempting not to. She wiggles her toes, and flexes her knee; she attempts to pull in her leg so her foot plants flat on the chair, but without the counterbalance of another leg she nearly loses her balance, and has to grab the arms of the chair in a hurry to hold herself up. From outside the workshop’s open door comes the sound of Winry clattering in the kitchen. Paninya peers over the edge of the chair, examining the bare stone floor. Winry’s battered old cushion has the imprint of her knees worn into it. A spidery cluster of wires lurks in one gloomy corner like a ball of silvery dust. 

And then Winry comes back. She lifts Paninya’s other leg from her workbench, matter-of-factly careful with her handling; she nudges her cushion across to Paninya’s other side, and scoots her tool tray after her. “Ready?” she says. 

Paninya draws in a breath. She lets it out. “Ready,” she says. 

The second is always easier than the first. It takes less time to hit the threshold of her pain, and less time to steady out into calm. Winry starts from the outside in, from the blunter sockets of the outside hip attachments, fixing into place near enough up beneath her ribs; and the burn creeps down, down, all down the line of her narrow side. She digs her hands into the arms of the chair and old, musty stuffing puffs out between her fingers. 

Winry slows her work, and stops. “ _Paninya_ ,” she says, almost laughing. 

“What’s up?” says Paninya, easy as she can through gritted teeth, though she’s pretty damn sure she knows what Winry’s noticed. 

Winry doesn’t change the grip of her fingers, holding whatever she’s holding securely into place, but she shifts her wrist a little, enough to press the back of one hand against the thoroughly damp cotton of Paninya’s underpants. “Really? _Really_?” 

“ _Oh_ , yeah,” Paninya agrees. It’s the hardest thing in the world not to try and push back a little, not to get some firmer pressure against her blood as heavy as a drum down there, but she sucks in a great determined breath and resists. Wouldn’t do to mess with Winry’s work, not so close to the end; wouldn’t do to start wriggling around mid-upgrade. That’s what all that recovery time _post_ -upgrade is for. “A girl’s sensitive down there. You gonna blame me for it?” 

Winry’s looking up at her with one pale eyebrow cocked, like she’s trying to disapprove, but the look’s not working; the smile keeps on slipping through. 

“And anyway,” Paninya adds slyly, “I know what _you’re_ like about automail, little miss mechanic – so don’t you try and tell me you’re not feeling it _just_ as much as—”

“All right! Great! Nearly there!” Winry blurts loudly, hurriedly, ducking her head to work again, “we’re almost done! Fantastic! Let’s keep going!” 

The backs of her white-pale ears are a funny glowing red. Paninya’d kind of like to touch them, see if they’re as warm as they look, but that would mean detaching her hands from their death grip on the chair, and that’s not happening any time soon. So she looks down at them fondly instead, and at the rest of Winry too, bare shoulders and ragged denim sleeves, flyaway blonde hair wisping out from the red-and-yellow bandana Paninya brought back for her last time she left town to go up into the mountains, all of her wedged down between Paninya’s gleaming automail knees. 

And maybe the anaesthetic’s taken this long to seep into her system, because now instead of anything else all Paninya’s thinking about is Winry sitting up late nights at her workbench, putting all that effort in for her, losing all that sleep to her – because the girl never has learned how to get to bed before the sun’s already lighting up the sky – and she’s feeling warm all through, spreading out from her core, peaceful as can be. 

“You’re pretty great,” Paninya says, reflectively. 

“True,” says Winry, without looking up. 

Paninya tries not to smile. She ends up wrinkling her nose instead. “And so am I.”

“Also true,” says Winry. She sits back on her heels. “Wiggle your toes for me?”

The tranquil peace dissipates in an instant. A hot thrill of adrenalin burns it out. Paninya’s gut leaps and rolls and flips on itself – attached! _finally_! – but she grips the chair tight, and wiggles her toes. And then she flexes her knee, draws in her leg, rolls her ankle, points her toes—

“Perfect,” Winry says at last: the official decree. She rubs the inside of her wrist across her forehead and leaves a smear of grease behind it, and next time she smiles up at Paninya it’s the proper kind, the usual kind: Paninya’s Paninya again, more than a system of moving parts. Not that Paninya minds it, being a system of moving parts. Winry’s single-minded focus is kind of hot, especially when that focus is taking place down between her thighs – between the thighs that Winry made for her. 

The thighs that Winry’s flattened her hands against, too. That particular spark is back in her eye as she glances up. “Open your knees again, would you?” she says officiously. 

Paninya complies as fast as she can: which is faster than usual. “Damn, these things move smooth. You got fiberglass in here, or...?”

“Only a little – but the skeleton’s mostly chrome, and I’ve been experimenting with the way I calibrate for weight,” as she efficiently peels Paninya’s underwear aside, “which is all a matter of the calculations, so I expect that’s the source of the difference you’re experiencing, actually... And I know what you’re going to say, so don’t say it, yes, I _know_ it doesn’t sound like much – but the thing is, it’s actually proven surprisingly effective in reducing—” 

Every word is fresh torment: a puff of warm air right where she needs more than air, every breath a gentle, ghosting torture. “ _Winry_ ,” says Paninya, in a tone of suffering that isn’t feigned at all. “I get this is dirty talk for you, but you’re leaving me hanging here. You are _really_ leaving me hanging here.”

“It is _not_ dirty talk!” Winry says at once, but her ears are already reddening again. “You asked a question, and I was answering it. Excuse _me_ for caring about the professional standard of my—ah,” she says, suddenly struck. “I should probably wash my hands, shouldn’t I?”

“Winry, I swear—”

“Oh, _fine_ – I won’t use them, then,” Winry says, before Paninya can get to the end of whatever strangled promise she’d been about to make – even she’s not sure what had been about to leave her mouth, the focus of her world narrowed down to Winry on her knees in the glare of the halogen lamplight; and Paninya’s head falls back against the headrest with a sound of incoherent relief. She’d sink her hands into Winry’s hair, if she could bring herself to remove them from the arms of the chair. 

Winry does use her hands, though maybe she doesn’t mean to. Palms flat against the gleaming panels of her inner thighs, holding her wide where Paninya can’t feel it, her thumbs run again and again along that seamless seam of metal and skin – like she doesn’t even realise she’s doing it, like she doesn’t have a clue just how wild it’s driving Paninya. 

Her skin is alight from the refit, and every touch feels devastating; and it doesn’t take her long to get there. Winry’s got efficiency in her blood the way some people have oxygen: not a movement wasted, not a stroke of her tongue that doesn’t get Paninya spilling out bits and pieces of nonsense she’ll never remember once they’re said – sentences that end up going nowhere, words that don’t link up, Winry’s name, Winry’s name, Winry’s name. 

“Winry,” she says, “oh, _damn_ , Winry—” and braces her new feet against the ground, and leans down to kiss her before she’s even caught her breath. 

Exhaustion doesn’t have the manners to sink in slowly. One moment she’s wired to hell and back and Winry’s looking up at her fever-bright, more grease smudging across her cheek as she wipes a hand across her mouth, both of them strung tight enough to twang with the assorted tensions of the refit; the next Paninya lets out all her pent-up breath, and Winry realises the trail of muck she’s leaving – and somewhere in there, all of a sudden, Paninya finds that she’s making a real effort to keep her eyelids winched open. “You’re gonna have to give me a minute here, Winry,” she says apologetically – gets it out just in time, just as her words stretch out into a yawn instead. 

“More than a minute,” says Winry. “No strenuous activity, remember. I can get by on my own until then.” She folds her elbow on Paninya’s new thigh and drowsily rests her head, knees curled under her. “You smell nice,” she says. 

Paninya leans over far enough to flick off one of the glaring lamps. “I smell sweaty,” she says. “But thanks, anyway.”

“Like wax,” Winry continues, “and polishing resin. And motor grease. And sweaty is nice, anyway.”

The other two lights are too far for Paninya to reach from the refit chair. She brushes her hand through Winry’s hair instead, where it’s spilling out the back of her bandana across Paninya’s leg. “Sounds sexy.”

Winry thumps a fist against her shin. “Just so you know – that would’ve hurt, if you could feel it.”

“You keep that up, you’re gonna leave a dent. You really want that, Win? You really wanna dent my nice new legs?” 

“An armoured tank couldn’t leave a dent in these things,” says Winry, sleepily complacent, and thumps Paninya’s shin again – but then she raises her head, suddenly, sharply. “Don’t you _dare_ take that as a challenge to fight an armoured tank, Paninya, or I swear on my own hands—”

“I won’t! I won’t, I won’t, Winry – I promise. I dunno where I’d even find an armoured tank, anyway. You think Al would make one for me?”

Winry’s stare narrows. “Bed rest,” she says. “Bed rest, beginning _now_.”

Bed rest sounds fine by Paninya right now. She slings an arm around Winry’s shoulders and lets her pull her to her brand new feet, though both of them know she could have got there on her own. The workshop lights click out behind them; the stairs creak beneath Paninya’s heavy, unsteady steps. Bed rest sounds better than fine, in fact, since Paninya’s got no intention of taking it alone.

 

 


End file.
